A Processual View on Social Presence Emergence in Virtual Worlds

Distributed collaboration is increasingly conducted in virtual worlds. Successful distributed collaboration is can benefit from social presence, the feeling of being there with others in a virtual environment. Social presence includes the dimensions of copresence, psychological involvement and behavioral engagement. Despite the importance of social presence, we currently lack empirically grounded understanding of how social presence emerges through these dimensions. To begin remedying this shortcoming, we analyzed how the social presence dimensions were organized in social interaction. We found that the order of the dimensions depends on verbal and nonverbal communication. These findings clarify extant theory of social presence emergence in 3D virtual worlds.